The Adventures and Misadventures of Homesteading in 21st-Century America

I’ve always felt a little leery of freezing things. I’m not sure why. I may have been traumatized as a child by eating bread that had been frozen; it just wasn’t the same, but frugal adults argued against my wise taste buds. But little by little, I’m overcoming my aversion to the freezer. (I even freeze my homemade bread now, but I always toast it, so I can’t taste the freezer taste. . .I know it’s there.)

Now I love having frozen cookie dough on hand. I make a double batch and hide the extra dough from my husband. He would eat it all. Seriously.

I cook one batch and freeze the other. Then I can pop a couple cookie dough balls in the oven whenever company stops by, when E. fills up a sticker chart, or on rainy days when I have two boys cooped up in the house. (The cookies are for me, not them. They don’t need any more energy.)

Not the prettiest cookies ever, but yummy

First, whip up a batch of your favorite cookies, scoop the cookie dough into an ice cube tray (one cookie per slot). Alternatively, you can place them on a cookie sheet and stick the whole thing in the freezer. My freezer is teeny tiny, so we use the ice cube tray method.

Let them harden in there for 24 hours and then scoop them out into a ziploc bag or other freezer storage container. As a side-note, I don’t recommend leaving them in the ice cube trays for weeks. They might get freezer burn and never get over it. Just saying.

Then any time the kids whine too much, you have an impromptu date night on the couch, or you just need an afternoon pick-me-up, throw a few, five or six, or, heck, a whole dozen if it’s been one of those days into the oven. You don’t have to defrost them or anything. Follow the recipe directions for time and oven temperature, but add a couple minutes onto the original cook time.

Last time I made these, I also rolled some into tiny balls to add into homemade ice cream sometime. I can’t wait to try it.

I am often cold in the winter so you’ll rarely find me without a scarf wrapped around my neck to keep me warm. I came across some scarves that I liked at a store (which shall remain nameless), but price tags that I did not: $14.99! I couldn’t part with that much money for a long rectangular piece of fabric. . . especially when I have a sewing machine at home.

So I made my own. I found three pillowcases from a thrift store and paid around $2 each. Two are Egyptian cotton and the other is jersey. All of them are super-soft which is a requirement of mine for scarves. It only took me about a couple hours to make three.

Step One: Go rummaging through your linen closet or the local thrift store and find some pillowcases (king size is best).

Step Two: Cut it to the size you would like. I cut about an inch and a half off one side. I also snipped off the bottoms of the Egyptian cotton ones (near the open end) because they looked too pillowcase-y.

Step Three: Fold over all the edges and iron. You could either fold over twice and hem or fold once and use an overcasting stitch. I did some of each.

Step Four: Sew around all the sides on the fold. You made a scarf! Add embellishments if you’d like. To the jersey one, I added prints of keys.

Step Five: Waste twenty minutes of your life watching YouTube videos of people tying scarves in all sorts of different ways. (I know I’m not the only one that has done this; there were 300,000 views. . . )